Many enterprises have experienced a dramatic increase in the number of computers and applications employed within their organizations. When a business group in an enterprise deploys a new application, it is possible to add one or more dedicated server platforms to host the new application. This type of environment is sometimes referred to as “one-app-per-box.” As more business processes have become digitized, a “one-app-per-box” environment leads to an inordinate number of server platforms. As a result, administration costs of the server platforms increase significantly. Moreover, the percentage of time that the server platform resources are actually used (the utilization rate) can be quite low. To address these issues, many enterprises have consolidated multiple applications onto common server platforms to reduce the number of platforms and increase the system utilization rates.
In such consolidated environments, certain executables may have undesired effects on other executables. For example, some executables can consume a significant amount of available resources (e.g., processor resources, memory resources, and disk input/output (10) resources). Other executables will then not be able to obtain sufficient resources to make adequate progress. Traditional methods to address this issue typically involve creating multiple groups to support the operations of respective groups of executables. The groups may be defined in a number of ways including by user login, user class, and application name. Limitations are also defined upon resources to be accessed by the various groups. The definition of groups in this manner generally prevents one executable from consuming a significant portion of all system resources. However, an executable can still consume a significant portion of the resources of its group.